Yahoo Messenger Officially Shuts Down After 20 Years

The once popular messaging service-Yahoo Messenger is being put to rest on July 17, 2018. After losing out to new and modern services like WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger, and failed resurrection attempt the company is logging it off. Users get six months to download their chat history.

Even before Google’s Gmail gained prominence, or WhatsApp became a part of our lingo, Yahoo had begun its Messenger (not Facebook Messenger) service, twenty years ago. The service was clearly ahead of its time and it was the cool thing in the early 2000s. Every person would be assigned a Yahoo ID. It was then that green, yellow, or red colors assumed significance. Green was for available, red was for not available and yellow for busy.

Yahoo was especially known for its chat rooms where people would talk to each other in Group Chats. You could meet random people on Chat Room and exchange email IDs. Mostly, these were fake email IDs that people would use since people would be talking to random strangers. This gave rise to the term ASL which stands for Age, Sex, and Location, which was would further initiate the conversation.

Even before emojis became popular, Yahoo already had them. Along with emojis, there were stickers as well.

Earlier this year, Yahoo announced it would discontinue its Yahoo Messenger application on 17 July 2018.

This means the messaging app is now officially no longer active, and users cannot chat with others using the service from today.

According to the Yahoo website, users will no longer be able to access or sign in to Yahoo Messenger.

“We recommend that you delete the app after you’ve downloaded your chat history and anything else you’d like to save,” stated a support page.

Users who want to download their chat history must do the following:

Go to the downloader request site.

Sign in.

Select a verification method, then enter the Account Key sent to you.

Click Download.

Enter the email where you want the file sent and click OK.

Watch your email for the file.

User chat history will only be available for download until the end of November 2018.